Unashamed: Bringing Sexuality Alive in the Birthplace of the Kama Sutra with @IndianSexTherapist Neha Bhat
Show Notes
In a country that birthed the Kama Sutra and Tantra, why are so many people terrified to talk about sex? In this conversation, Christine and Neha Bhat walk straight into that contradiction: the body as a battlefield between desire, duty, and silence. Neha breaks down trauma responses in bed, tells raw stories from her practice, and shows how art, breath, and ritual can turn “I’m broken” into “I’m finally here.”
Neha Bhat, ABT, ATR-P is a Sexual Trauma Psychotherapist, Entrepreneurial Coach, Clinical Supervisor and Bestselling Author of Unashamed. As an internationally renowned speaker in decolonial psychotherapy, sexual trauma recovery and creative arts-based wellness methods, Neha goes by Indian Sex Therapist on social media. This channel is her public offering where she offers free trauma therapy tools & in-depth videos on healing from sexual trauma, especially within the Indian psyche.
Having worked in sexual-assault-trauma care at the University of Michigan & the Art Institute of Chicago, she employs trauma-focused therapy for people who have survived and perpetrated sexual violence.
Neha consults on films and documentaries written around intimacy across Amazon Prime and Netflix US. Neha's first book, Unashamed, addresses how problems of mental health and questions of sexuality can be tackled in a rapidly changing India.
Listen in if you’re curious about what happens when shame loosens its grip and you start to live as one whole, unashamed self.
In this episode, we cover so many topics, including:
Why “Unashamed”, and the Indian Sex-Negative culture
India and the US: Two Perspectives
High‑relational culture and the matriarchal gaze
Defining Trauma & the 4F responses (Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn)
4Fs applied to sex
Case Study: Kusha & Somatic + Art Therapy
Sex as Gateway to Deeper Connection
Myth, Archetype & Trauma Work as a Doorway to Spirituality
Retreats and Relationships as Containers
Gen Z’s thoughts on Social Media distortion
Reconnection Therapy
Chakra System & Base Centers
How to Choose Safe Containers
Queerness in India today
Cultural Exchange
The Temple of 64 Yoginis
Helpful links:
Neha Bhat - Author of the Bestselling, Award-winning book Unashamed: Notes From the Diary of a Sex Therapist
"My Annual Healers' Training for Practicing Wellness Coaches, Therapists, Yoginis, and Doctors to upskill themselves in the sexual trauma aspect
For updates, follow Neha on Facebook and Instagram as @indiansextherapist
Chup: Breaking the Silence About India's Women by Deepa Narayan
Your host:
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Transcript
Neha Bhat 0:05
It's just this narrative that we're thrown that don't talk about it. Because the moment you say it doesn't, you don't talk about it, it doesn't exist, and then you don't actually think about any of the nuances that come across along with that. Hence, you know, Indian men suffer. Indian men suffer. Indian women suffer. The Indian men suffer so much loneliness today because they're waiting until 30 to even experience touch.
Christine Mason 0:32
Hello, everyone. It's Christine Marie Mason, and this is The Rose Woman Podcast. We talk about lots of different topics on love and liberation and finding your own evolutionary edge around doing the inner work that could create some kind of new capacity or competence that would let you meet the world with more equanimity, with more tolerance, with more love, with more joy, with more peace, with more Power. Many of you know that I have been working for a long time at the intersection of women's embodiment, spirituality, sexuality and the culture that we've built. I've done that through Rosebud and the books I write and many other things, teaching Tantra, and I try to feature voices from many walks of life who are doing similar mission oriented work, and today, I am so excited and blessed to have as my guest the wonderful Neha Bhat so I came across Neha through Instagram. Yes, there are some good things about social media, one you can find really well trained, highly competent, very sassy and very fun people with a strong point of view who share a common mission. Neha is a licensed arts based sex and trauma psychotherapist. She travels between India and the US and is the founder of the first sexual trauma therapy training collective in South Asia, Neha had specialized in sexual assault trauma care through clinical training at the University of Michigan, at the Art Institute of Chicago, at Rush Medical Center at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. And she is a trauma sensitive media consultant. She works on films and documentaries and reality TV shows that are focused on sex and intimacy across various platforms, and she regularly shares free psychotherapy tools on social media, and teaches art therapy courses at St Xavier's College in Mumbai and multiple American universities. And in 2024 she published a book called unashamed, which we're going to talk about extensively in this interview, which provides a very empowering roadmap to understanding sexuality, mental health and trauma healing, both in a rapidly changing India and for the Indian diaspora, and frankly, from almost Anyone who has had challenges in intimacy and relating. While some of the names have been changed, so to speak, on the themes that we cover today, they seem to be rather universal. Purity culture exists all over the earth, and so does the unwillingness to talk about the most intimate parts of our bodies and our life, and in fact, the place where, in ancient Indian traditions and the tantra traditions, they say that sexuality is the heart of co creation with the divine, and any religion that doesn't have sex at its center has lost its life force, has lost the point. There are a lot of reasons that Eros is something that culture tries to control. And you might go back and look at some of the episodes we did last year on the church's dominance of women's sexuality and reproduction, on agriculture, patriarchy, all of those kinds of things, just for keep just for giggles, just because you want to know, like, What's the origin of our forgetting that our sexuality, our sensuality, our intimacy, our relatedness, our kinship with all of life is sort of the heart of joy in being alive in a human body and part of it, and not to be denied, as you'll hear in this episode, we talk about What happens to one's creativity, to one's energy in general, when this part of the body, when this part of the functions of being in a human body, are not honored and fully lived into it leaks out into all kinds of other ways that that are suboptimal. So thanks for tuning in. We're going to get started with this interview in one minute. I do want to tell you about some programs coming up with me. The first one is our spring cohort of the living Tantra course. That course runs six weeks. It's the last time I'm doing it live. It's going to go into an interactive digital format that you can do a self paced course on so that I can constantly. Trade my live classes on advanced topics. Then we have an Easter retreat, the mystic heart of Easter, which is four days in Southern California. I'm co hosting that with a wonderful Shaman. And I'd encourage you to look at christinemariemason.com to find out more of that. The Portugal retreat has, I think one room left. It's just about sold out. So that's in May. If you'd like to get together with me. At the end of the year, we'll be running our November immersion yoga month at Sundari again, and you can come and join me there for one week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. You can couple that with a detox. You can couple that with training in doing water massage or training in various aspects of yoga teaching. You can couple that with deep embodiment practices. I have a couple of extremely talented practitioners in pelvic floor healing and sexual healing work that are doing hands on work in the community. So there's a lot of things that you could plan to do as a November tune up for your embodiment. So all of that being said, thank you. I hope to see you in person this year, and now please meet the wonderful Neha bhat. So tell me a little bit about you chose the word unashamed as the title of this book, probably for a particular reason. It's almost a transmission in itself. Can you speak about that?
Neha Bhat 6:29
Indian culture is supposed to be the home of the Kama Sutra, the home of Tantra, sacred sexuality, and, you know, 200 years and more of just a lot of colonial, Victorian shame from British colonization, but also just from our own stuff has been all mixed in, and today we just have a sex negative society. And by that, I just, I don't mean in terms of people aren't allowed to explore partners, etc. I mean this subject is itself seen as dirty, shameful, sick, perverted. These are the words that shine in the Indian mainstream. If you open a newspaper, you will see, you know, rape reports. You will see police people like, you know, doing carceral justice, all of that, very important. Like, of course, you know, we need accountability, but there isn't. There are no conversations on just, what does it look like when you haven't dated till the age of 25-26 which is the average age when an Indian person actually starts dating. Then you get married by 28-29 that's the cultural expectation. Then you're supposed to have two kids by the age of 30, and then what? And then you just, like, sort of stay in this bubble of saying, okay, my life is done, and I sort of die by the age of 30 to like experience a metaphorical death, because now my sex life is done and it was only based on reproduction. Now anyone else who kind of moves outside of these binaries and boxes is seen as a little bit difficult, dangerous, unorthodox, and there is social shame that goes towards them, actually. And this can be people who are queer. This can be people who are in multiple relationships. So there's a whole spectrum of Indian sexuality that runs as a double life. And now this is the last thing I'll say about it, until I hear from you, it's a dual life. So obviously, a 25 year old has not not masturbated, right? It's not that they haven't touched themselves. It's not that they have not had a romantic escapade, but all of that is happening behind closed doors. You're going home. You're telling your parents, you're you live with your parents. In India, people live with their parents till they die. It's a part of our culture. However, you don't tell your parents who you like and what you've done outside of like, whatever the straight lines they've drawn for you are, and when you get back home, you pretend that that life never existed. So there's this very scary duality that a lot of us Indians are healing from, and which is why my book was called pig and bold unashamed, because it's more an invitation to actually live a more integral, connected, authentic life. Yeah, I
Christine Mason 9:13
feel the pain of this lack of transparency, of having to tell your family one thing, and then your life inside being different, like the separation of that and not being known deeply by the people you're closest to in your fullness, and then how that secrecy breeds an ongoing sort of transference between the generations. I bet their parents are also thinking and doing some pretty kinky stuff in some ways, but just not telling their kids can't be just this new generation. That's the only one. It seems to be an ageless problem.
Neha Bhat 9:47
Yes, and just to on that note, I mean, you know, I get a very alternative view of India because for because people tell me things that they don't tell other people from where I sit. It's a very sexually active society. It has a high libido. There's a lots of interest in dating. There's a there's lots of kinky, not and not just kinky, but just even vanilla, let's say, interactions happening. It's just this narrative that we're thrown that don't talk about it, because the moment you say it doesn't, you don't talk about it, it doesn't exist. And then you don't have to actually think about any of the nuances that come across along with that. Hence, you know, Indian men suffer. Indian men suffer, Indian women suffer. The Indian men suffer so much loneliness today because they're waiting until 30 to even experience touch.
Christine Mason 10:37
I can't, I can't imagine, I can't imagine that as a Western woman, but I know that that's true in other parts of the world as well, and it creates, I mean, this silence around sex and sexuality has such a high cost, not just for the individual, but I feel like, isn't it implicated in, like, global violence?
Neha Bhat 10:54
It is not. It is absolutely not. And the cultural aspect of the fact that this wasn't the case. So when you speak to, let's say, people who understand Indian scripture, you know, it's very different from the West, because the West looks at the past as something to almost move away from, and the future is where progress lies for us. It's a little different. Our past was very rich because, you know, we understand that consciousness is a cycle. Life is a cycle. So this used to be a rich, transparent, authentic society, and then it's now very poor. It's the global south. It's, you know, in development, but also emotionally, culturally, mentally, spiritually, we are pretty broken as and this is, there's a spirit of brokenness in our people. And I don't mean Indian specifically, I mean people across the world who have experienced any kinds of multiple generational violence. We know there's a brokenness. So when I speak about sex, it's too threatening. It's almost like, Why? Why do you want me to talk about this? This is supposed to be personal. You know? I can, I can tell you. I can talk about this if it's something to do with rape or something extreme like that, but what about just healthy, normal sexuality? No, I that's too much. Does that make sense? It does make sense.
Christine Mason 12:12
It's almost like you have this core experience of being human that is held so privately, but you don't see how that relationship with the inner world of the self is tied to the way the broader culture expresses and I love this idea, like, not don't love but I mean, I'm very taken by this idea of a multi generational history of violence and how that would lead you to shut down and have a protection in the Self, absolutely.
Neha Bhat 12:41
And here's where I talk about male privilege, because in India, actually, male privilege works very well, because most of my clients are men, and they have a lot of access to, you know, wanting to, wanting to be a little bit more liberated in the body. And in the West, you know, I work in Chicago as well. I've trained in the US. So my practice in the West looks very different. It's the women leading there. It's the women dragging the partners to come to couples therapy and saying, Let's heal in India, it's the man saying, You know what, I want my wife to be a little more sexually open. Can you help her? Because you're a woman, you probably understand female concerns better than me, and I'm just like, yeah, go ahead and the woman comes with so much shame, so many trust issues, you know, understandably, but she goes, No, I'm not going to go against my cultural sort of like brainwashing, to say a little bit, to allow me to just live a little more freely, because, you know, just because my husband's asking me to, and then they label the husband, my husband's perverted. You know, he has a high sexual need. Sex is not that important in life. Children are important. They'll try to, you know, avoid the entire need within themselves.
Christine Mason 13:53
Indian women, that's, would you say a little bit more about the script that you hear Indian women running and sort of, when does it begin? I read, I read Deepa Narayan's book, chop around the silencing of young girls and their body desire. Yeah. What do you see if they're coming, if they're being dragged along by their husbands? Is there a common narrative, and where does that start? Yes.
Neha Bhat 14:15
I mean, the common narrative is very much to do with what other other people will say. Because here everything is all about the external lens, right? It's this. I call it high relational cultures, India, China, Singapore, Malaysia, we are highly relational. Versus American culture is little bit more individualistic, yes, of course, what people will say, but the social consequences of saying bye to your mother in law in the US versus and you know, you see her once a year, thrice a year in India, you live with her. This is the cultural norm. You not just live with her. You prepare tea for her in the morning, then you prepare lunch for her in the afternoon. Then you prepare, you know, as a woman of the house. You're very much under her gaze, specifically in terms of matriarchal let's say, gaze. You're under the gaze of a woman all the time. So more than you judging yourself, you're thinking, what will she say if I wear a top that you know exposes my breasts a little bit because I want my chest to feel a little bit more free. You're thinking, What is she gonna say? And what is she gonna say implies, what does this mean about my family? So automatically, because she's gonna label you fast or loose or dangerous, you know that means you've trapped her husband. You've gold trapped her hug her son into being perverted away from the social norm. This is very much mainstream Indian problems. So now you see places like Bangalore, Mumbai, New Delhi, very different, because many couples live in small, little apartments away from their in laws, and there's a lot of social shame about that as well. It's like, How dare you leave your your your parents, you know, in the village, how dare you you don't stay with them? Oh, you dress. You wear mini skirts. Like, what does that mean about you? That means you're a selfish daughter. So it's the gaze is always external. I'll say one last thing about this. I run this healers training program, Christine and it's all about empowering other women, healers, coaches, therapists, etc, to train in sex therapy, and the healers themselves, the healers themselves are so afraid to come out in public and say that I'm trained in sex therapy, because you know, what will my Father say, if he says, looks at my counseling degree, you know, juxtaposed with the sex therapy training,
Christine Mason 16:47
I love those pictures of you with your graduates. They look they looked so happy and present and together. Thank you for doing that. Do you so it sounds actually like, if you could get to the matriarch of the household, that generation of women could really trickle down to all their daughters in law.
Neha Bhat 17:05
Exactly which is what happened with my mother. My mother is a very different woman, like she did not impose this on me. So no question was asked when I choose to study sex sex therapy, you know, I choose to not have my own kids, there were no questions of, what does this mean about our family? And that's because a lot of my parents generation and their friends had already broken some of the intergenerational barriers. So they had already moved away from their in laws. They had already started their own life, lives in new cities. You know, they had given me a globalized education. Of course, it comes with its own privilege, but they did not stop me from whoever, whatever I wanted to study passionate or not passionate, etc. Not the case for my colleagues, a lot of my friends.
Christine Mason 17:49
Thank you to your mother, and for anybody out there who is doing the work of breaking intergenerational patterns. Okay, so when I was looking at the book, one of the things I really liked was the wove psychoeducation with exercises and reflection prompts, and put in some client narratives so that people could understand it more that. So it's both. I want people to know that it's both a combination of of a workbook and a textbook. And he started sort of with defining trauma, and I liked that you had the discrete events and the ongoing stress responses for those people who are new to trauma response, can you expand on that definition so that they can locate their own experience within it? Yes.
Neha Bhat 18:32
Thank you for that. I always define trauma as a trauma response as something that is above or below. What is the context? So let's say I'm walking on the road and someone calls me fat and a slur. What is my appropriate response? Right? What logistics a question for you, like, what should be my appropriate response? Just some stranger on the road?
Christine Mason 18:58
Well, what it should be like? What my enlightened self would be, well, that's an interesting opinion. That's an interesting opinion. Glad you have an opinion about my body. Have a nice day, you know, basically. But usually it's not that. Usually it's like, oh, my god, am I fat? Have I not looked in the mirror lately? Is my booty hanging out? You know, might be something four o'clock, those lines Exactly.
Neha Bhat 19:18
So it's but it's still to do. And yours, yours sound like they're still to do with you. I know people who will go out there and try to slap the guy, they'll try to run after the woman. They'll try to run after the guy and ask him, What the hell, why did you say this? Tell me why you said this. You know, these are more confrontational women, let's say from the North. You know, from Punjab.
Christine Mason 19:35
I'm trying to imagine myself doing that. And like, the fact that that did not even enter my realm of possibility says a lot.
Neha Bhat 19:42
Okay, exactly. But, but, and the and the response you described is the very regulated, the enlightened self who's like able to see this is not about me. This is about their projection. I just need to go about my day. That's regulation. That's appropriate context. Some stranger assaulted you on the. Road verbally. Don't worry, stranger, go about your day. Regulate yourself. A trauma response goes high or it goes low. So this person that I described who ran after this guy is a real life case example. She ran off with this guy, and she tried to, like, ask him, Why did he do that? Does he not have a mother? And again, the Indian thing, don't you have a mother or sister at home, don't you treat women well, it's always the family that that's attacked. So she attacked his family. And the guy was just like, you know, he didn't know what to say. And he essentially was like, Who's this lady? This is the fight style. This is like, I'm not scared of confrontation, and I will make you feel small, because you made me feel small. This is a fight trauma response for anyone else, for anyone who's new to trauma responses, right? The opposite of fight would be flight, to run away, so to run away in such a way that it's like too much. I can't think about this. I'm just completely not going to address this thing happen. I'm going to delete it from my memory. I'm going to go have a drink. Now that's flight. You're not actually even processing what somebody said. You're not even making sure you're okay. You're just running away. Then there is freeze. And freeze is just like, oh my god, he called me fat. What a weird guy I'm I'm probably horrible. Is my booty hanging, etc, etc, and I can't move, and like an excluded response is, I can't move, I can't go to the next thing I'm so upset, it's brought me back memories of when my dad fat shamed me, when my mother fat shamed me, when you know my husband fat shamed me, my whatever, whatever, and I it floods your brain that nothing else happens. And then you have the fourth one, which is fawn. And fawn is that you become a deer in the headlights, where you just kind of get arrested, and you just wear it. You're like, Oh my God, I don't know what to do. And so you just agree. You just, you just sort of smile back. Imagine the person smiling back at someone who's assaulting you. You know, you're like, Haha. Are you okay? Are you okay? You're trying to actually make sure the other person's Okay, trying to, they see you as a nice woman, you know. And this is a very Indian response. They'll just be like, they'll just say something nice. They just tell that, tell the person to go away. They'll be very polite. If this happens in the South. A South Indian response is very like, demure. And so if you just juxtapose this with sex, just whoever's listening, you know, please think about it that way, a fight response in sex is, I'm gonna fight my rapist, I'm gonna fight my abuser, I'm gonna take them to court. Good you need that sometimes flight is I'm just gonna not even act like they hurt me. I'm just gonna act like they didn't even hurt me. I'm just gonna leave this whole incident like aside. I'm just gonna go out go about my day. You're running away when you were assaulted. Let's say, for example, sexually freeze is that you're just you're just laying in bed. You don't like it. It's horrible what this person's doing to you. You don't you don't like their touch, and you just can't move. You're a dead fish and fawn is you're smiling outside, you're saying all the right words, but inside your body is really uncomfortable, you know? And so Christine, just the segue to this is a lot of people who come to me with vaginismus, which is a condition where your your vulva just closes up because of so much shame that you're not able to actually control it. You're not able to help yourself in bed. You're not able to say no. You're not able to say, I like it. I don't like it. You're just frozen like in time.
Christine Mason 23:41
So this just can this disconnection from the body is learned early, and it's difficult. Like I would say, if you don't have that contact, you would have difficulty distinguishing. I don't want this or I do want this from I'm shut down because shame or fear is in the driver's seat right now. So what are one of the things I loved in the book is when you narrate someone in a detailed way through how to feel your feelings and how to get back in touch with your actual body's intuition. Who was talking to the other day, oh, I know, Mark Whitwell, and he was saying so beautifully that you know, the brain isn't in your head, the brain is your entire spine connected to your entire nervous system inside of this great feeling, amazing sensory perceiving body, and to reconnect your awareness to that, and getting a clear of a lens as possible is part of the job of coming fully alive and and how do you how do you work with people to bring that back online?
Neha Bhat 24:41
Yeah, I am an art therapist. I trained in art therapy, which helped me to actually externalize the pain. Taught me how to external help someone externalize the pain. So what I do is, I start with the talk, but then we move quickly into the body. So let's say, and I'm talking about, let's say, a very clinical piece that I let. Say chapter one. You know, this lady called Kusha who came to me looking for a sex toy. Essentially, she heard of me through Instagram. She came to me saying, Neha is going to give me a good sex toy recommendation. And that's it. That's sex therapy for me. And little did she know that she got along really well with me. And then she went, you know, I'm really angry with myself that I cannot, I can't orgasm. But I just, every time I close my eyes, I imagine this one guy, and she had never said that before. She's like, I just need to get married. Everything's going to be fine with this sex toy. You know, I'm going to be sex positive, like everybody else is pushing me to be in this, today's modern culture, but somehow I'm just thinking of this guy. And then we investigated. It took around six months, and we went to a core memory, which was a repressed memory for her, that as she was changing when she was six years old, there was this old grandfather, kind of perverted guy like staring at a six year old's body through the windows of her own house, and she was a six year old girl. She was changing. She was coming out of the shower. She was changing. And she looked at this man, and she looked at his eyes, and she just screamed. And luckily, her mother came, and her mother asked her the right questions, gave her a hug, and, you know, told her she's safe, but the mother wasn't equipped to actually process trauma, etc, because the mother didn't know mother isn't just, you know, regular Indian mom, and Kusha grew up with that memory sort of burned through her brain that whenever I'm looked at, this is the guy who my brain is associating it with. So a male gaze is this guy, this perverted Kai. And so in the somatics, you know, when we came to the body, we sort of did very deep meditations using lots of tantric philosophy that you talk about quite often. We did breath work, but we specifically also looked at this particular memory cognitively. We attached breath work to it. She identified the gaze, and then she drew the gaze. And then I asked her to gently re like, to reframe her association to the gaze, after which she made a beautiful vulva, her own vulva, because it had become very frozen in time, which is why she couldn't masturbate or experience any kind of pleasure there. And then I asked her to create this vulva with fabric. And then we opened that vulva up very gently with our hands. We practice with that somatically. Then, you know, she went home, she practiced with her own vulva. Then she brought her partner to sex therapy. The partner turned out to be a really lovely guy who helped her through just, you know, being patient with this, you know. And took two years, but she was, she was able to really feel very different in her body from what she did when she came in.
Christine Mason 27:51
Yeah, I mean that kushas narrative and the translation of the male gaze from a hostile thing to the male gaze of her partner being loving and inviting changes her life from those two years on for the rest of her existence in a body like people say, Oh, is it worth it to invest in this thing of therapy or whatever? But you know, you're gonna live in this body for a very long time. That was a beautiful story.
Neha Bhat 28:16
Thank you. Oh my gosh, yes. Investment is such a big thing because it's so shameful. People had a very weird association with money around this as well. And I'm sure you see this too, but money and sex are so connected, you know, can you receive? Can you give? Can you be open in this exchange? Yeah, and then once people get to the transformation, they're like, oh my gosh, you completely, you know, you gave, almost gave this away for free, because this is like so less for my entire life being transformed.
Christine Mason 28:45
I mean, what it seems to be happening is you might take this example and you heal this one piece, but you're actually making space and training people in somatic capacity for everyday life, for ordinary life,
Neha Bhat 29:00
absolutely, absolutely. So the Talking is the gateway to the doing.
Christine Mason 29:05
Yeah. Like you could probably even talk to your mother in law,
Neha Bhat 29:09
yes, yes. And for me, like yourself, right? Like sex is not the main point of what I do. And I've noticed from what you put out there as well, sex is a gateway to deeper connection. Now that deeper connection to one person could look like poetry, the other person could look like music. To the other person could look like deeper sex. You know that those outcomes differ on whoever, wherever we are, on our soul journey, wherever we want to go, and all of that. But when you when this is the Indian problem, when you bypass sex completely, you know, as like dirty just by just inherently, then you're actually bypassing a very important phase of life, which you then you can't ascend to the higher chakras, like spirituality. You can't ascend to anything higher. And a lot of Indians will gaslight themselves to say that, you know, I am good. I have. Had sex in 23-25 years, somebody will say to me, I live with my husband. I haven't had sex in 25 years. But, you know, my kids are grown up, and, you know, I would never destroy family for just for sex, but I'm going to all these, like these devotional places, and I'm attaining God, and it's like, Why do you think? And have to be like, Why do you think sex and God are so separate, right? And then I have to do a lot of work in that association, because they'll be like, What do you mean sex is dirty and God is God. And this is, of course, like Christianity has this, Islam has this, Hinduism has the same association. But what I keep saying is that let's go back a little bit and let's look at the culture around us. Like, let's not look at today's culture, but like, then I have to take, you know, a lot of these folks to retreats. I take them to sacred spaces in India, and then they look at these Indian temples with Alva, you know, where your menstruating Goddess is being, you know, worshiped, or Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, where I was, I just came from there, where you have all these goddesses, like bedecked in sacred sexuality. And then people, Indians, are like, Oh, this is my culture. Yes, honey, this is our country. What are we doing? Why aren't you having sex?
Christine Mason 31:17
I love that you're bringing that up. You know, I said that the reason I came to India, why I left Christianity in the beginning, was because there was no sacred feminine, potent power. There were no goddesses. And, you know, as I've come back and reclaimed the Magdalene in my own tradition, I feel like that's been a big move of integration. But I had ladies. I had to come to India to find the feminine represented as sacred. So I I wonder, just as an aside from the book, are you? Are you aware, a couple of years ago, on the sacred Mount Arunachala, there was a landslide that opened a giant Yoni, yeah, I am aware, yeah. And I was looking, we're looking at that the other day and going, you know, it's like, you could not have a more clear indicator of like, Hey guys, you've been worshiping the Shakti, Shakti, Shakti. I mean, you've been worshiping Shiva, Shiva. But, you know, at the base of every Shivling is a Yoni, and you've been forgetting that. So why don't I put it literally on the side of a mountain? Like nature could not be more clear that they go together, yeah, yeah.
Neha Bhat 32:23
But, you know, we're suffering this. You know, where America was many years ago, like, like, like, how anything that was non rational was seen as pseudosciencey. And yes, it's still there in the American culture, but it's like, I think it's decreased a little bit. India is very much there. Like, like in urban elite India is so close minded to this topic, because they'll just be like, What do you mean? Science in nature? You know, what do you mean? This is unscientific. And I'm like, do you know your own history? Do you know your own culture? No one's telling you to become, you know, to start worshiping God and forget your brain, which is saying, like, there's other things in your own mythology that myth is real. Signs are real, stories and poems and oral history, the juice of sexuality. You know, at this I met this doctor the other day in Kaji Rahu, who was telling me Indian doctor, she said, the entire training in India around gynecology is only medical, medical logic, logic. She herself hadn't had sex in six years, and so I was telling her, like, wow, how do you do this work? And you don't have to have sex with a partner, but what about masturbation? What about your own body? She said, I can't touch it. I can't touch my own body because I'm so disgusted, because of all the patients that I'm seeing. And she was just like, you know, if I say anything like, I can see the uni on arurajna Hill, my colleagues will look at me as I'm as if I'm insane.
Christine Mason 33:54
Well, maybe, maybe we are a little insane, but I'd like to think that we're living in multiple realms at once. Like to live in the realm of the mythical and the archetypal is like, that's that's actually how I see most of the goddesses, Gods. Deities is that they represent frequencies that are available to all of humankind to pull down into your daily life. You want to tap into your potency and power, your protective, fierce mother, then tap into dorga. You want to tap into, like the mother of all mothers, tap into Mary. You know, there's like a way of saying, I can feel the potency of these, of these beings inside of my own embodiment. And that's a way to live my life. And so, rather than treating it as some kind of idolatry, you know,
Neha Bhat 34:39
yes, and I think you have done some trauma work, a lot of trauma work of your own. So for whoever is listening, that's what it should sound like. You know, that's what a person can sound like after they have looked at what's blocking me from accessing multiple truths as real and leaving truths that are. Not resonant with me and going my own way, you know, just, just, I just, I'm just reflecting back to you Christine, like, yes, you're talking about a very integrated sense of self that you have where you've broken away from something in the past, from your own tradition, then done inner work. Then come back to it, you know, you've had these journeys. And I think sometimes India is so advanced and at the same time, physically so poor because of all the traumas that we have. But spiritually, emotionally, it's such an advanced philosophy. Cannot tap into it without having done their trauma work, which is why then I exist, because oftentimes I see the moment I help someone with trauma work, they're quickly going into the spiritual realm in India, because they're like, oh my god, I remember, you know, they'll have like, a past life remembrance to say, Oh yes, this is not alien to me, you know, versus with Western European, Euro American women, they'll also say, Yes, this is not Asian to me, but there's a lot more work to be done, in some ways, to sort of introduce these archetypes for Indians. It's easier because it's in our lived experience. We're just so disconnected from it.
Christine Mason 36:12
I love that that is so beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for that. You know the piece that you mentioned about the your the doctor who couldn't touch herself, like she doesn't do that. You know, that piece of the Rosebud stuff that I was that originally sort of was the first manifestation of the bringing the ideas into material reality, was, yes, touch yourself. Yes, touch yourself and reclaim yourself as Holy, holy the entirety of your body. So as you're as you're bringing. And I love what you just said about making the vulva puppet, or whatever it was, that is such a beautiful exercise, you know, to navigate it, to touch it that way, like have a proxy, beautiful. So what are some of the other ways you're using to bring women into their embodiment? I mean, I suppose men too. I know. I know also, I didn't raise this for you, like, like, it's not just, we're not just talking about traditional heterosexual, monogamish relationships. We're talking about anyone. So let's say anybody, bring anyone back into more contact with their body.
Neha Bhat 37:18
One way would be just this cognitive verb that someone comes in and wants to speak about their trauma, which is very usual, like, Oh, I found you here. I want to speak about this here. I have stopped even seeing one on one folks. What I do is now I empower other therapists and healers to be able to hold this conversation. Because just one Neha, and you've seen India, it's so diverse, and the world is so diverse. We need so many of us in all our different capacities. So I said I've started empowering other people in these transmissions through long trainings. But the other thing I do is I invite people to now retreats, which is something I used to do in the US at in the centers, very easily, I would go to a devotional bhakti center do a retreat there for four to seven days, it would be quite about, you know, healing from intense rape crisis, and a lot of families would come to me at the time. Now, I think there's less and less need for it to be only shaped as an extreme like therapy and mental health and coaching, to be just an extreme conversation. Because I don't know if you remember, but I remember very clearly when people would go and seek help only when something is burning. Right. Now, that's different. It's a little different. People come in even in the initial signs of discomfort, or they'll say, you know, I heard about this. I want to try this. It's good. I think it's a good shift. But the retreats do something deeper. They hold transformation with containment. So someone doesn't have to keep accessing a one on one space. They can actually spend, you know, and I know you do beautiful retreats as well, but they can spend long hours in community, develop and in India to find like minded thinkers is a little hard, because these spaces are so rare English. And it's not only English heavy. There's multiple languages. So people can come from different parts of the country, connect, from the world, connect, but in that connection, they also make new connections. And in that new connections, in those new connections, I help people to rewire. So this male gaze thing with Kusha, this example, I somebody came in with a similar story, and I paired her with a very safe, masculine man who had not experienced touch. And he was like, you know, the I just am so anxious about being seen as a perpetrator that. And he was young, you know, young Gen Z guy. He said, my entire generation is talking about, like, consent, boundaries, how to not approach a woman, etc, etc, that he's like, I just stopped approaching women. So he's like, but I really want to, like, I want to be a good guy. And I could see in his eyes that, you know, he was sincere. So I paired this late, this girl, up with this guy. And. Had the most beautiful contact, where they felt very supported in each other's sincerity. And what I do with these spaces is also make it very clear, right? Like, if you cross boundaries maliciously, you're out. Like, that's not what my job is here. My job is if your sincerity is real, we can take you through many transformations, but if you're trying to get something else met here, like in these sex positive spaces, then goodbye. And that itself is such a I think it's a healing container for a lot of Indians, because they're just very hyper vigilant. And they think that, you know, the moment someone touches us, they're trying to hurt me. But then they come to a space like this, and they're like, oh, okay, there's clear boundaries here. I can say, No, the facilitator cares enough that she's going to kick someone out if they hurt me. You know, again, because India's justice system is so difficult and court cases take such a long time, accountability is at an all time low. And you know, I love India. This is my home. I don't mean to not painting all the negatives. I'm saying even when I was at the rape crisis, I was Chicago, it was the same thing. But retreats in the US have a different flavor, versus retreats in India, I feel like people really feel very supported by this kind of containment. Yeah.
Christine Mason 41:15
I mean, I love that you spoke of the retreat as the container, but you also speak about creating relational containers like you, that if you're taking people into retreat to learn intimacy skills, because you can't learn them in selfish or one sided dynamics, they require reciprocity, then you are also talking about you and your partner, or partners creating a consciously Trauma Informed Partnership, where the relationship becomes the container for growth, so you might take them into a retreat environment to begin to cultivate that but, but how do you articulate for couples, what's possible when, when you're just starting out with this like tentative, maybe even alienated approach, exactly?
Neha Bhat 41:56
And you know, one of the biggest points that I got from this young Gen Z crowd was that, actually, I love that this wasn't about politics. And this was someone in Indian American who had flown in from the US for this container in India. And he said to me, I'm so pleased because America and I've seen, I've seen the decline of American society in this way that you can't even talk to people without this radicalization today of identity politics and all of that. And so he said, you know, our generation has stopped dating like we don't even have crushes anymore, because everything is on social media, and you're already judging someone based on their political identity, their religious identity, etc, etc, so you're not even like asking them out for friendship, like, Can we, can we go out for a walk like you're not even saying that? So he said it was really cool to come to this container where politics was on the side. That's not the main thing that we talk about here. That's not our interest. Our interest is connection beyond that. Our interest is values driven. It's, you know, it's depth driven, it's consciousness driven. And he said, I actually went above my judgments about what I would have thought this girl would be. You know, I would have labeled her if I found her online. Well, I
Christine Mason 43:09
think you're pointing to like this really big opportunity to develop intimacy and presence with the very person in front of you and make a decision for yourself that social media is an abstraction layer, and you're not going to believe it absolutely.
Neha Bhat 43:24
Yeah, it's corrupting us. It's corrupting the way we connect today, for young people, for sure.
Christine Mason 43:29
So you're really you're also doing much more than sexuality. It's a reconnection you're doing reconnection therapy.
Neha Bhat 43:36
I should call it that. Yes, that's true, that that would probably have more social acceptance too, if I call it reconnection there.
Christine Mason 43:44
Yeah, we are. We are de normalizing your pervasive sexual disconnection. If you say you haven't had sex in 25 years and you're proud of it, that normalization is like a offers a profound opportunity for you to come more alive in your body and your relationship. Like, like, can we talk for a minute about about the block? Like, how blocking this part of your life impacts your creative life, your energy flow in general?
Neha Bhat 44:15
Yes, yes. I think Hinduism has some answers to this. You know, I think it's one of the most interesting philosophies which has an answer to this. And I'm multi faith. I love different faith systems. I love Christianity. I love Islam, some aspects of every every religion. So this particular religious philosophy, Hinduism, has the system of chakra system and chakras, which we may have heard of, for listeners who don't know what it is, they're just energy knots. You can't see them, but they're energy centers and knots that live in many parts of the body, all across the nervous system, but they're centrally aligned in seven major centers. This is what we believe in today's modern. Times. Some say they're nine, some say they're 16, etc, etc. But the base energy centers, the base chakras, are where sex lives, reproduction lives, and digestion lives. So like, if I were to say to you, don't poop for 25 years, what would you say? Right? You wouldn't be like, Wow, I'm so great, I would say, I would say ouch, exactly. I wouldn't say anything, because I'd be dead. You would literally die, because that's such an important function of your body. And if you don't excrete and you don't discharge whatever waste you create, that's bad for your body. Similarly, you we have. We all take on sexual energy. We all take on imprints from others. We take on energy formations within our system that have to be discharged and released. So sometimes my clients will say, but I cry and I'm like, You can cry and you can orgasm. You can do both the things, and you don't have to orgasm just because you know, the guy is asking you to you don't have to do it with your husband. You don't have to do it with someone who hurt you if you can't leave them, you know, because sometimes they'll be in relationships where they can't leave you, but you can do it with yourself. And they think that that, and sometimes people think that that chakra that's misaligned, etc, etc, can just, it just has its own role. You don't have to actually pay any attention to it. You can, just like, meditate and get over that sexual feeling. This is a lot of Indian thought, because Hindu philosophy has bypassed sex a lot. Although we are the land of sexuality, we've bypassed it. I say to them, but do you notice that you're very angry, you know, you notice that you've been telling your daughter that she's a b word, she's a C word, because having sex, you know, at 16, and this lady will say no, but that's because, you know, I don't want her to get hurt, and then I have to, like, place it back to her and say, you say you're so close to God, you know, yet you have this judgment towards anyone else who's not like you and you haven't actually used a very basic function of your own body. What do you think that's doing to your health? And it'll take them, you know, a good one year in depth work to be able to say, Oh my gosh. In a retreat, it's much faster, because a retreat will be other people will be saying, no, no, no, no, no, this is not okay. You know, you have to that energy has to go somewhere. One of the major, yeah, major factors, again, connected to trauma responses. If your trauma responses are very high to anything, there's some energy blockages there, and you have to look at it. You have to do some work around it.
Christine Mason 47:43
You're really going back to what you pointed to earlier around positive psychology. And we're moving now from like we're going to heal trauma, we're going to reframe cultural narratives into we can have a life full of connection and full of high energy. And I just find that there's, something in here that then seems to move from the inner world becomes the outer world, not as a metaphor, but like as a real causal chain in daily life, like the example you just gave around taking out your unprocessed lower chakra energies on your daughter in law, that the intimate dynamics of this household that's organized around fear and control contributes to the larger social field, and then we're, like, a little bit more on edge with everybody we
Neha Bhat 48:26
touch Right exactly. And you know what I'll say, the opposite as well. You know a chakra that is that is not functioning to its maximum capacity, and it's not functioning elderly. The opposite of that is true. When you repress so much you're always wanting that, that energy, to come out in some other way. And this is what we see with this 85 year old grandfather, you know, perving on a six year old's body. I mean, she doesn't even have boobs out. What do you think he's looking at? You know? And this is, and by that, I mean, there must be so much sexual charge and so much perversion normalized in that person's life, that that chakra is also imbalanced because he's not discharging it appropriately healthy with people of his own age group, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Christine Mason 49:13
It'll come out in other ways. Yeah, very accurate. It's kind of going in the direction they have what's possible. And I feel that through this work, it's there's a quality that they're that they're that a person's world sort of reorganizes when you bring them back into their their own body, pulling the decisions about how to be in the body, in relationship and sexually back to your own self, that there's such a potential in that for how life might unfold differently for you. And I don't have the question isn't really coming, right? But maybe we could riff on that a little bit.
Neha Bhat 49:52
Yeah, I think that. I think what I'm hearing is like, how someone may think that you you know you're just doing sexual reconnection work. But actually the outcome is much larger. The outcome could be politically very different. You know, you could, you could actually your entire worldview might change, which is what I've seen happen. And not that my retreats are transformative. I don't mean that. I mean that people come with such good intention, and then they connect with someone just in the moment of presence. And I take, I take the phones away, you know, I give good, you know, very good food. Just presence, presence, presence. I put all the facilitators in the room. And then people are like, Oh my gosh, this thing that was triggering me about my mom is not feeling as intense anymore. And then like, why is that? It's nothing to do with sex. Why is your mom's trigger less, you know. And then they'll think about it a little bit, and they'll be like because I think I am feeling more connected to my own signal. So instead of going back and blaming somebody else for making me angry, making me pissed off, making me slap them, you know, making me punch them, I'm able to actually connect to my own somatic cues much faster, because I'm not distracted by just doing this all day, which is, I'm just I'm just like pretending to be on my phone. I'm just not distracting myself all the time from what my body is picking up, and that, yes, has to do with sex and connection to the Sexual Chakra. But once you're connected, everything starts flowing in its correct direction, which is, you know, again, yoga calls it prana. The energy flow is going in the right channels, and your perspective feels more grounded, more streamlined, more focused. You have less time for bullshit. You have more time for your own life.
Christine Mason 51:39
I was thinking about the example in the book where you're using the someone's pet died that one, and how what happens when you take a drink or pick up the phone? It's not that you get away from that. You're just burying that. And so I'm really wishing for more people to be able to hold their feelings, to be able to not be afraid, to have a look, to have a look with friends, with partners, with therapists, because it does seem to roll out really quickly into more capacity to love, more capacity to be together in a real way. So thank you so much for all of this incredible work, particularly in a culture that is so hungry for it, you just seem to be really doing revolutionary things.
Neha Bhat 52:21
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I think these connections are very important, and we must talk across disciplines. I think one of the reasons I'm so excited by conversations like these is because we need different brains from different exposure levels and different cultural backgrounds to come in and kind of dissect this topic that's been buried for so long, because our outcomes might look different, but our intention is one. I've been
Christine Mason 52:46
having some challenges in using the word Tantra, teaching classical shaivas Tantra as a Western woman, and I was, you know, having a little anxiety about that with you, because of the neoliberal, colonial projections and all of the stuff that is in your writing around you know, how do we take this? I mean, I don't think this material that's in Indian traditions, lives anywhere else, in any indigenous culture, is documented as well, is as thoroughly explained as as the shaivist Tantra, or perhaps of a Vajrayana Buddhist Tantra. It is nowhere else on earth preserved in that way. It probably existed in ancient Egypt, but it's definitely not preserved in the same way. And so there's a sense of coming back to the source of 1000s of years of uninterrupted investigation of how the light lives in the body, but then I'm skipping over hundreds of years of oppression, and I'm trying to find the right way to deliver this material while honoring its its origin. Yeah. And you
Neha Bhat 53:51
know, I'm actually less critical of people who are not from this cultural background, who may have interest in I'm a big fan of cultural interest. Christine, I've lived myself abroad for so many years, you know. And I have, like, I love Spanish culture, black culture, different experiences. And when I go into a black household, they may see me with lots of suspicion, but some of the things are very common, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's a healthy cultural conversation that I'm willing to have. I think a lot of my skepticism around neoliberal Tantra is from my own people who have not studied any any of this, like maybe a one day workshop, have not actually held themselves through any shadow work, and then they're diving right into extremely dangerous territory with sex therapy. One of these retreats I went these, these, these groups ended up taking their clothes off and, you know, again, like way, way in the south in India, taking their clothes off in the forest, and then sleeping with the facilitator. The facilitator was sleeping with the students, and then they were calling it Tantra, which was like, really. Shock you? Yeah, yeah. They were calling it again. We don't have like, regulation, right? There's no regulation for retreats, and the US is over regulated, but India doesn't have any regulation. So anyone can call themselves whatever they want, which is good for democratization of knowledge, but then you don't have any standardization. So people pay a lot of money to go here. They believe this person. I even fell for this person's like marketing and depth, which is what I thought, Indian again, Indian person. And people were just taking their clothes off and having sex without any any like, any depth or boundaries or any containment. And two, three people had panic attacks like at the retreat, because they said, Oh my gosh. Like, this is exactly what I do every time. This is I just go and hook myself to this new relationship. And I'm here coming for my sexual healing, for tantra, but here I've ended up in this again, this repeat pattern. And you know, the facilitator was very against taking feedback and all of that. So I just kind of, there's just so much of that here, because there's no regulation that I'm just written in the book. Like, you know, there's these forms of inner work. There's this forms of inner work. You want to do Tantra work, then go, go to a person with lineage, who's, who's, who's investing in their own inner work. Now, they can be American, they can be Siberian, they can be Russian, they can be Indian. Doesn't matter their race, but look at what they're bringing to the table, you know, and I'm just very critical of Indians who are doing this, I think, just to be clear,
Christine Mason 56:33
yeah, well, I think you're you feel like a very protective person to refrain critical is discerning. I am discerning, and I powerfully care about people's healing is a beautiful offering. Thank you. And then, and then, if you go into, like, if you could guide people into choosing a container, what are some things to look for that that's probably also helpful. Like, if someone, if someone, brings you so rapidly into a shock situation. Here's how to notice it in your body, and just be a note of that like it should feel like you're blooming, not like you've been hit with a hammer.
Neha Bhat 57:11
Check, if I mean before going to a container check. You know what? Who the person's teachers are? Are the teachers there on the website, or their lineages. Just a little bit more about where did they study, what did they study? Exactly? And some people choose to not put any of this out there. And so if you if you can have a private conversation with them before signing up for their retreat, that should be fine. Just you should know that an independent practitioner who's devoid of any community can cause a lot of harm as well. So whenever you know at least four or five people who know them, you know, maybe they're on podcast, they're talking with other people, then you know, you know that this person is in conversation with many people. Sometimes there's just the independent one sort of route, like, you know, one sort of, like, loner teachers, I call them, and they have a sense of like, I'm better than anybody else. And while it's going to put my workshop right up in the forest, no one can access me. You pay this much money, you come here, whatever happens, like stays here. Don't do that, that, that that is not what Tantra should be. Shouldn't be such a miss. It's a secret, but it shouldn't be so mystical that there's no way to get in touch with you or get in touch with the teacher if something goes not so right. And the second thing is, I would say, even in these experiences, when you go in, always go with a goal for yourself. Don't expect your teacher to just be your next mother figure or your next God figure, because that's also what happens in these places. A lot people just go and, like, push, put everything on the facilitators plate to be like, now you tell me, if you're going to do that, then you're opening yourself up to a lot of somebody else's power. So always go with maybe, okay, not like exactly what I want, but maybe I would like this. I would like clarity around this, etc. So when they're leading you to experiences which are too much for you. You can say, you can have agency and say, I would like to just stay away from this breath work. I would like to just take it slow for this one, you know, in this particular retreat, what happened is everyone had these high escalations, and then everyone was like, What wouldn't it be so exciting if we just took our clothes off and they took their clothes off? Then they were like, Wouldn't it be so exciting if exciting if we just kiss? Then they started kissing. And then when, when people said something, they were like, No, your sex negative, you know. So just, just look like, why? What is someone else getting from this? Are they getting pleasure? Are they getting, you know, feedback? What do they want from you? That's a really, really
Christine Mason 59:42
going in with like self advocacy and and also, a good facilitator will explicitly name that you have self advocacy when they open the container, like you can, what would you say at the beginning of every yoga fest? You can always take Child's Pose, my friend, you can always bow out Right, exactly, exactly. You do? You want to say anything about queerness or other things in Indian culture, and how that ties into the work?
Neha Bhat 1:00:08
Yeah, I mean, I'm queer, so when I came out in India, it was still illegal to do so, from the Victorian law of like, anal sex being, you know, so British, the British, when they left India, they left with this law that anal sex was like an act of perversion towards God, and like you look at our ancient temples and you have anal sex, you have oral sex, you have everything depicted there. So being queer is very local, indigenous, very natural to any tribe of ancient cultures, just like here. But when I was coming out. It was not it was illegal. Then it took 10 years, then we legalized it. Gay marriage is still illegal here. However, you can have lots and lots of non monogamous or monogamous queer relationships under the state, and you can be quite okay today in big in big cities, for sure, in India. And so if you're Indian, or if you're someone from an Eastern heritage, and you're listening to this, I would just say, like times are changing for sure, and sex therapy for queer people does look a little bit different, because the gender, the power imbalances in same sex relationships are a little bit different, like whoever's the more masculine partner, the feminine partner, these are A little bit different. But you know, polarity of life is the same. I would also say sexual health clinics to find non judgmental sexual health clinics. All of this is still very hard in India, and it's very much centered in the local cities. So if you're queer, and if you're living in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, you know what I'm talking about. But if you're listening from, say, in an Indian from a very remote part of the world, I want to just change your mind a little bit and allow you to see India a little bit in a different light. Things are not as repressed as they used to be. And here is where I will applaud Gen Z for being able to bring this conversation to the mainstream like very much, though, way more like, I think, 100 times more than when I was growing up.
Christine Mason 1:02:05
Yeah, you've done a very good job of articulating the difference between a personal healing and structural oppression throughout and this is one area that is particularly strong. So I do feel that that's the power of the internet and podcasts and all of the way the world has changed. It can spread misinformation, and it can be dehumanizing and create pornography that doesn't help people respect and love each other, but it can also do this and say you are not alone. You deserve to be happy and free regardless of your embodied condition. It's special and beautiful that you're you, and to find allies like you to do that.
Neha Bhat 1:02:44
That's right. Thank you so much. That's really well put. Yep, I take that for me. I so
Christine Mason 1:02:49
love talking to you. I could go on forever. I want everyone to buy the book. And I tend to be deeply interested in how each culture has its unique needs for exploring and and looking at, how do we become more free in our bodies. If there's, if there's something that you could wish for the men and women of India, maybe someplace they could start today. What would that be?
Neha Bhat 1:03:10
I would say, read the Kama Sutra. Simply put, I would say, we have it online, free. Just look at your own tradition a little bit differently. If it's specifically gay, this advice is specifically towards Indian men and women. Then please read the Kama Sutra. Just a free, free, free copy online. Of course, my book is available. That's a little bit deeper. However, I do want to say something to just everybody who's listening, all over the world. Please, let's have more conversations like this across culture. Everything doesn't have to be a certain box something. Sometimes knowledge just has to be exchanged from different backgrounds and diversities. And I think that world has stopped doing this in the last seven to eight years, and I think it's a high time we try to learn from each other, rather than trying to box everybody up into silos.
Christine Mason 1:03:57
Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for joining me and Neha on this episode of The Rose woman. Please visit rosewoman.com and support all of our beautiful, intimate care products that make the show possible. Thank you to Tim Wahlberg, our producer, and thank you so much to Geneva Tolentino, the production assistant for all their support and continually creating the best that we can offer you with this show. Remember, you are holy, holy, head to toe all parts of you, as my friend Mark Whitwell says, Are you not the cosmos arising as you? Are you not the beauty and intelligence of the cosmos arising as you and the answer is, of course, you are and so is everyone else. So much love wherever you are and however you're walking today, may you find your own special spark. See you soon. Hey, did you stick around? For the outtake, I'm gonna give you a little bit of blessing story from South India about the 64 yoginis, the wild feminine that is at the heart of Tantra. So India is all things, and one thing it is is a land of incredible and varied temples. And many of the temples are predictable. They have the same structures, just like many churches do in the West. But there are some temples in India that break almost every rule, because, first of all, they're circular, not square. They're open to the sky, and the figures carved into their walls, 64 of them facing inward. Are not the serene goddesses you see in calendar art. These goddesses have animal heads, Lion, serpent, jackal, owl. They hold skulls and weapons. Some are in erotic posture. Some are dancing. All of them are fierce. These are the temples of the 64 yoginis, and almost no one talks about them. Only four major ones survive in reasonably good condition, hirapur and ranipur. There's one in Odisha, and there's one above Khajuraho and one near marina in Madhya Pradesh. There were likely many more systematically destroyed or simply abandoned when the traditions that built them were driven underground. And I want to take you inside. Ready? Okay, imagine entering Haripur at dusk. It's small, maybe 30 feet across. You step through a narrow doorway, and suddenly you're encircled. All of these figures surround you, carved in black stone, each in her own niche, and at the center, a small shrine. You are standing inside of a mandala made of stone. The yogini temples were designed for nocturnal rites. So this roofless Temple is open to the stars and the goddesses themselves were understood to be connected with lunar energies, with stellar configurations, with the night sky itself, the circular form, which was so unusual in Hindu architecture, which kind of almost universally uses the square is the shape of the womb, the shape of Shakti, The shape of cyclical time rather than linear time. So the yoginis face inward toward you, toward whatever happens at the center. So who are these? 64 different tantric texts give different lists. The names shift across lineages, Kaula, Trika, Shakta, the Tamil Sidd traditions. But there are patterns that hold first, they represent 64 manifestations of feminine cosmic energy. You can correlate that with the 64 arts that are mentioned in classical texts, or with 64 tantric power spots across the Indian subcontinent, or with the geometry of the Sri Yantra, this beautiful intersecting set of triangles which contain this number inside of the structure. Or you can take the eight matricas, the eight mother goddesses, and multiply that by eight and get 64 some texts. Think of these yoginis as maps of the subtle body and correlate them with the petals inside of your chakra system, or specific nadis, or energy points, or with particular states of consciousness. These are are not beings out there, as we've talked about before, the deities and Goddesses are a sort of frequency. They're aspects of the one Shakti, energy, feminine energy, that you encounter at different points and practice and at different stages of awakening. They're not gentle. They're also called kulanganas, women of the Kula, women of the clan. But they're also called dakinis, shakinis, bhairavis. They can do things like haunt cremation grounds or demand offerings that violate orthodox purity code. They are the wild, feminine, untamed, uncivilized, and they don't care about your comfort. So in the Kaula Tantra traditions, the most esoteric stream of Hindu Tantra, the human yogini, the female practitioner, was understood to be a living embodiment of these cosmic yoginis. It wasn't metaphor, like you're kind of related. It was It wasn't symbol. When a cowl practitioner engaged with a yogini in the secret practices, he considered himself to be engaging with the goddess herself through her human vessel. So this connects to the Devadasi tradition the temple women often mistranslated as temple prostitutes by people who couldn't see past their own projections. At its height, before colonial intervention criminalized and collapsed the tradition certain Devadasis were tantric initiates. They held lineages. They carried transmissions. They were the yoginian in body form. Yeah. So the temples may have been sites for these practices, a physical mandala where practitioners would gather to perform the rites, which always involve the five M's, meat and fish and wine and Parsh grain and sexual union offerings that deliberately cross the boundaries of conventional purity. We've been talking about the purity culture thing in in many different episodes over the last years, because we know that Shakti is alive at the edge in places that proper to society likes to like, close down and not look at the tradition that I'm currently studying, the Tamil Siddhant also contains sections on Shakti worship, on the chakras, on the subtle bodies that encode yukini related practices, but his characteristics are a little bit veiled. They do talk about the Sri Chakra and the goddess traditions, but it's not nearly as specific the alchemical work, both internal and external, that the spirits represent often required a Shakti, a human female partner, or the awakened internal feminine principle, to be completed. This wasn't so much about gender, but about polarity. Shiva without Shakti is Shava, a corpse. Consciousness without energy is inert. The yogini, whether cosmic or embodied, provides the activating current for consciousness. So if you're wondering why we don't know more about this, it's because that tradition was attacked from every direction. The Brahmins and the orthodoxy in Hinduism consider Kali Tantra dangerous and impure, which from their framework it was, I guess, the Islamic invasions destroyed temples and scattered lineage holders. The British criminalized practices they couldn't understand, collapsing the Devi tradition into the category of prostitution. And Hindu reform movements in the 19th and 20th centuries, which were embarrassed and trying to make Hinduism respectable to Western eyes, disavowed Tantra entirely. So what survives is fragmentary. Some in odishas, living traditions, some in Nepal, where Tantra wasn't suppressed as thoroughly. Some the SRI Vidya lineages that preferred the more domesticated form of the Sri Chakra worship and sort of pass through the eye of the needle to survive, and some in the oral transmissions on the Tamil Sita path. You won't find much of that in the books. So I stood inside hirapur A few years ago. It's small and intimate, and the figures are weathered. Now, the face is worn smooth by centuries of wind and water and sunshine, but the field is still active, and you can definitely feel it. It is the space of the feminine and all her forms. Whatever happened in East temple wasn't decorative, religion, performance or entertainment, you could feel it as a place of transformational practice, using the wild feminine as a vehicle. So 64 faces power, real power, that asks something of us. And I think what they might be asking of us is to get in touch with the part of you, dear listener that can't be controlled, that has her most undomesticated form front and center your active, wild and amazing heart.
